Undergrad Research: Creating Life in a Digital Medium

[PrimordialSoup]

I'm doing an undergraduate research project using jPCT.

I'm working on creating a semi-realistic physical environment involoving real-world physics (Gravity, collisions, etc.) in space using only spherical objects (for simplicity's sake).

Once I have the minimum level of physics done (should be in a few weeks) I'll be moving on to inserting objects into the universe that mimic plants (photosynthesis).

I'll also be working on a background process that will mimic the effects of radiation exposure, altering the genetics of the life forms as they live their short lives (about five minutes).  This should allow evolution.

In this project, jPCT is being used just for the rendering of objects and life forms, so you can see them interacting with eachother.  Anything and everything else will be done as much as possible from the project's code, in order to divorce it from the renderer as much as possible.  That way, it could fairly easily be ported to another renderer (like Java3D for example, if you want hardware acceleration), or be left to run with little to no user interface, and a java applet used to view what's going on from another machine.

[java]

Sounds interesting to me. Do you have anything to show? A link or a screenshot would be nice.

[PrimordialSoup]

Here is a screen shot of the most current version.  Right now it is just a simulation of real-world gravity.  Normally you would be able to see everything moving, but this is just a screen shot.

[PrimordialSoup]

In case anybody is interested, I've finished the collision and gravitational systems in my project.

I may have an applet demonstration soon.

[Anonymous]

I may have an applet demonstration soon.

That would be cool!

[EgonOlsen]

I may have an applet demonstration soon.

What happened to that idea? I would be very interested in your results.

[PrimordialSoup]

Life didn't quite co-operate...

I'll see what I can do in the next few weeks.  Writing up an applet for the thing should be a trivial task, because I built the thing with the idea in mind.

I've also got to dig it out of my archives...I've been moving around so much the past couple of months that I haven't worked on it since the semester ended.  Then there's the fact the computer I had been using for developing the project kindof lost it's hard drive to age (thankfully I was able to rescue 98% of my files before it gave up entirely).

I haven't pulled the project out of it's zip archives since then, but I'll see what I can whip together for you...

On a side note, I got an A on the project...

Progress Update:  Gravity works, and collisions do as well, with only mild bugs that I could fix with a little work.  Once those mild bugs are fixed, the only unrealistic thing will be that the numbers are rounded off somewhere around sixteen places to the right of the decimal...